A social network service is an online service, platform or site that focuses on building and reflecting of social networks or social relations among people (e.g., those who share interests and/or activities). A social network service essentially consists of a representation of each user (often a profile), his/her social links, and a variety of additional services. Most social network services are web based and provide means for users to interact over the Internet, such as by e-mail and instant messaging. Social networking sites allow users to share ideas, activities, events, and interests within their individual networks.
Social networking sites (e.g., Facebook®) present to a particular user the posts and stories by other users in a social networking feed (referred to as a “news feed”). New postings or updates from friends and pages followed by the user (including photo tags, event updates, group memberships and other activity) will be reflected in the news feed. If a news feed contains multiple updates, it is likely that the relative importance of each update differs to the user, depending on the topic, associated people, etc. However, if all the updates are displayed to the user with the same level of richness (referring to the amount of detail, visual display size, etc.), then the user has to spend a great deal of time in reviewing the updates to determine which of the updates are important to the user and to process the information of value.
Currently, social collaboration tools attempt to manage attention and volume of the postings in the news feed by “rolling up” similar posts or stories into a summarized update (e.g., “ten people liked a file”) rather than providing a unique entry for each update. However, the summarized update may involve summarizing a high volume of unrelated content updates which may not have a common basis for rolling up. Furthermore, users may desire to see the update entry, especially if the update is important to the user.